GenBank Errors

OPEN INVITATION
Let me put my money where my mouth was at the end of my last epistle to
the great unwashed (sorry, but you have to have a sense of humour in
this job, too much politics and not enough science!).
To any of you watching or contributing to this subject:
If you have a list of ills that need fixing and have ideas and the
willingness to impart those fixes, then come help us do it as part of the GenBank Curator Program.
Submit to me (and to the networks if you like) a proposal for what you
see wrong and how YOU as a Genbank Curator would go about correcting or
adding to the data to redress the problem.
Proposals can involve direct correction to the data, or development of
data integrity software to fix old problems and prevent new ones.
Proposals do not necessarily need to target a "pre-existing problem" as
such, to qualify for consideration. Please include a summarial CV.
The final arbiters of proposal suitability are the GenBank Project
Officers at NIH, with feasibility recommendations from us, and as Dr.
Irene Eckstrand noted, I'm sure they will take input from any
discussions which ensue on the net.
We'll bring authors of successful proposals out here and train them up
on our annotation tools and standards (while seeking input from you on
the same), or on the programming aspects of the RDBMS, and then provide
you with secure access to the database so that this work can be
continued remotely.
Examples of previous and existing projects include: development of
vector sequence checking software for internal (inplemented) and
external (i.e., publically available; now in development) data
integrity check, added value annotation and error correction to
Herpesvirus, EBV, S. Cerevisae and the G-protein superfamily of genes,
development of direct data transfer mechanisms for LS sequencing
projects, and enhancement and standardisation of E. coli genetic
nomenclature. Reports on some of these projects have gone out in
previous GenBank newsletters.
Finally, I have no wish to exclude anyone from these discussions,
however if this suggestion generates a considerable response, I would
respectfully suggest that, unless there is reason to believe that such
would be too limiting, this discussion move over to the genbank
bulletin board.
Regards,
--paul
Paul Gilna, Ph.D.
Biology Domain Leader
GenBank at Los Alamos